Le Corbeau (The Raven)

Henri-Georges Clouzot - The Master of thrillers
AFG Film Club presents at The Club
(AKUMB, 40 Toumanyan Str.)
* Free Admission. All films are in original language with English subtitles.
Tuesday, February 2, 2016 at 20:00
LE CORBEAU (The Raven)
1943, France, 91 min, Crime / Drama / Mystery, DVD
Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot
Stars: Pierre Fresnay, Ginette Leclerc, Micheline Francey
A mysterious writer of poison-pen letters, known only as Le Corbeau (the Raven), plagues a French provincial town, unwittingly exposing the collective suspicion and rancor seething beneath the community’s calm surface. Made during the Nazi Occupation of France, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau was attacked by the right-wing Vichy regime, the left-wing Resistance press, the Catholic Church, and was banned after the Liberation. But some—including Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre—recognized the powerful subtext to Clouzot’s anti-informant, anti-Gestapo fable, and worked to rehabilitate Clouzot’s directorial reputation after the war. Le Corbeau brilliantly captures a spirit of paranoid pettiness and self-loathing turning an occupied French town into a twentieth-century Salem.